US-Japan ties face challenging times with the abrupt resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after an uphill battle to renew a law for providing military help to US-led forces in Afghanistan.
The United States had lobbied strongly for Japan, its key Asian ally, to extend the anti-terrorism law but Abe threw in the towel Wednesday following persistent refusal by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to back the overseas mission.
Abe's resignation, coming just days after he pledged to fight to renew the law despite strong opposition from DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa, leaves the future of the half century old US-Japan military alliance unclear, US experts said.
"It's a turning point possibly in terms of the growth of the US-Japan alliance," said Michael Auslin, an Asian expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative US think tank.
Abe and his charismatic predecessor Junichiro Koizumi, the one who first committed Japanese military to anti-terror operations including in Iraq, had been trying to globalize the alliance, Auslin said.
But Ozawa, the architect of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP's) disastrous defeat in the Upper House election in July, succeeded in undercutting this drive, at least temporarily, he said.
Abe has now left it to his successor to negotiate with Ozawa to prevent any withdrawal of Japan's naval forces from the Indian Ocean, where they currently refuel coalition ships operating off Afghanistan.
US President George W. Bush told Abe when they meet during an Asia-Pacific summit in Sydney earlier this month that the Japanese role in Afghanistan was "absolutely essential" and called for an extension of the anti-terrorism law, which expires on October 31.
Bush's deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey said after the leaders' meeting that Washington would be "very, very concerned" if Japan withdrew from the operations.
"The president made this very clear," he said.
National security spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters Wednesday that he expected Bush to telephone Abe this week.
"Japans reliability as an ally" would also be questioned if the anti-terror law was not renewed, warned Michael Green and Kurt Campbell, Asian experts who had served in the Republican and Democratic administrations respectively.
But some experts believe the US-Japan alliance is rock solid and cannot be shaken by a single issue.
"Japan's retreating from a mission like that will be very unfortunate, sends a bad signal and certainly be a disappointment to the US but with continued engagement between the close allies, I think they will find a way to move ahead," said Nicholas Szechenyi of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"My sense is that Japan in the long run will continue to maintain its leadership role," he said.
Bruce Klingner, a Northeast Asian expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, cautioned against using Japan's military mission in Afghanistan as the sole benchmark to gauge bilateral ties.
"Although it certainly is an important test, I think if the US places too great an emphasis on it, given the DPJ's opposition, that overemphasis may hurt the relationship more than the legislation itself," he said.
Although Abe's LDP controls the lower house, which has the final say in most legislation, bulldozing the law's renewal may further hurt the party's image in Japan's largely consensus-based political process.
"Washington needs to be cognizant of the new political paradigm in Japan and realize that securing a victory in renewing the legislation may come at a cost of straining relations with Japan," Klingner warned.
The Japanese are already troubled by the sudden softening of Washington's position on North Korea and its heavy reliance on China to resolve the crisis.
